Wireless communication networks are widely deployed to provide various communication services such as telephony, video, data, messaging, broadcasts, and so on. Such networks, which are usually multiple access networks, support communications for multiple users by sharing the available network resources. One example of such a network is the UMTS Terrestrial Radio Access Network (UTRAN). The UTRAN is the radio access network (RAN) defined as a part of the Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS), a third generation (3G) mobile phone technology supported by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP). The UMTS, which is the successor to Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) technologies, currently supports various air interface standards, such as Wideband-Code Division Multiple Access (W-CDMA), Time Division-Code Division Multiple Access (TD-CDMA), and Time Division-Synchronous Code Division Multiple Access (TD-SCDMA). The UMTS also supports enhanced 3G data communications protocols, such as High Speed Packet Access (HSPA), which provides higher data transfer speeds and capacity to associated UMTS networks. Other example networks include GPRS/EDGE, CDMA/DO, and/or EUTRAN (4G LTE).
Wireless devices may include a subscriber identity module (SIM) card to facilitate communication with communication network via a subscription for the designated voice and/or data subscription of the wireless device. When a SIM card is initialized (e.g., at power up or after a SIM card is inserted into the wireless device), the wireless device reads the content of several files stored on the SIM card. For example, during the initialization process various features stored on the SIM card (e.g., address book, text messages, network names, etc.) are read and made available to the wireless device. In addition, the initialization process may take a significant amount of time depending on the number of files on the SIM card, the size of the files on the SIM card and/or the number of records of the files on the SIM card. For example, each file on the SIM card may contain up to 255 records. Thus, if it takes an average of 30 ms to read each record, the initialization process may take over 7 seconds to read that particular file on the SIM card. Moreover, during the initialization process various services may be not be able to be accessed by a user of the wireless device until the corresponding files have been read from the SIM card.
Therefore, it would be desirable to have a method and apparatus that decrease the initialization time of a SIM card.